Every Man in This Village is a Liar Quotes

“You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done.
Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don't die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can't leave your actions over there. You can't build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of the poison seeps back into our soil.”
― Megan Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. ... We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.”
― Megan Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done. Here”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“As it turned out, the first thing I knew about war was also the truest, and maybe it's as true for nations as for individuals: You can survive and not survive, both at the same time”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“The sea pokes the horizon like the tongue of a parched man, blue corroded by salt.”
― Megan Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War

“Here is the mental rearrangement: People who live in a dictatorship will tell you the most with awkward silences, the fear that flashes on their faces, and the implausible exclamations of rote enthusiasm. It's what they don't say that counts. You have to consider the negative space, to trace the air that surrounds the form to get an idea of its shape, because nobody will dare to articulate the thing itself”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“Actually is a word that has been degraded to adornment and punctuations, but it has a meaning too: it means right now, while we are on it.”
― Megan Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War

“And this is Jerusalem, world capital of dubious stories, centuries of stories half forgotten and passed on, stories of saints and prophets and torturers, everybody fighting for the best story, the one that gives you a religion, a claim, a right.”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“Break their bones. That’s what Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the Israeli soldiers, or so the story goes. Some Israelis insist this was a command to be soft with the Palestinians. Break their bones but don’t kill them, beat them but don’t shoot them. But an American reporter who covered that intifada told me he saw Israeli soldiers systematically break the arms of little boys, one by one, working their way through a village, so they couldn’t throw rocks.”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“His enormous grandfather clock clicked and ticked, an hour turned over. He turned his head and frowned at its face. “How does that clock know when it’s night and when it’s day? It’s a twelve-hour clock, but it never chimes at night.”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“Afghans lived on the edge of mortality, its tang hung always in the air, in their words. If death would come to us all, the Afghans couldn’t be bothered to duck.”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

“An American reporter fell on the ground and lay there crying. I looked at her, and at the corpses. Intellectually, I knew that her reaction was appropriate, but I felt disgusted by her weakness. Staring down at the bodies, I felt numb, light, as if my own body might vaporize, as if I didn’t need to breathe.”
― Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War